TWEETS

Pick Up Where Salesforce Leaves Off and Make it Easy for Prospects to Connect with You

By Kevin Flanagan | April 11, 2017

Unless you’re selling luxury automobiles to residents of Beverly Hills, most sales people face myriad challenges when it comes to meeting quotas and driving sales growth. Let’s take a look at some of the realities in the world of B2B sales.

We know sales people spend a lot (as in way too much) of their time calling, chasing and waiting, which adversely affects pipeline velocity and, too often, quality.

In fact, many sales pros report that they wait, on average, 3 or 4 days for qualified prospects (both marketing- and sales-qualified leads) to be ready to talk further. If it takes an average of eight touches (email, phone call… rinse and repeat) to schedule a meeting with every lead, and it takes multiple meetings to close a sale, this adds a lot of time (we’re talking weeks or even months) to turn a lead into a closed deal. In that amount of time, a lot of things can happen—many of them very bad—including prospects losing interest, or the competition moving in to poach what once looked like sure-thing sales.

And it’s no surprise that sales people spend too much time doing administrative tasks and not enough time selling.

Who doesn’t like to spend a big chunk of your work week on tasks that aren’t directly related to what you’re getting paid to do? Anyone?? That what I thought. But it’s been shown that sales people spend about 40 percent of their time each week performing administrative tasks. That leaves only 60 percent of their time to achieve at least 100 percent of their quota. This loss of valuable time cuts into sales productivity and performance. It also adversely affects the pipeline and company revenue.

Although most of us spend a lot of time using digital devices in our work and personal lives, human connections still matter more than ever in the sales process. Even if most of our business interactions occur online, there’s no substitute for connecting directly with an in-person meeting at critical points in the process. Personalization reinforces the authenticity and credibility of sales people, enabling them to become trusted advisors, which builds relationships. The majority of your prospects expect this. In fact, research shows that 79 percent of them want you to be a trusted advisor—not just a sales rep—who adds value to their business.

So now that we’ve laid all of this on you, you might be wondering what you can do to minimize non-revenue-generating activities and focus on the important stuff—selling.

That’s why we created Scheduler for Salesforce. Available on the Salesforce AppExchange, Scheduler redefines how marketing and sales people are using Salesforce by making it easy for prospects to schedule meetings with you—right from within Salesforce.

Since its January launch, we’ve been continuously enhancing Scheduler’s capabilities to give sales teams the most intuitive, easy-to-use way to:

Generate a stronger pipeline

Close more deals faster

Build trusted relationships with your prospects and customers

Check out this video or download the data sheet to see how Scheduler can help your business connect with prospects and increase sales.

Watch our latest webinar, featuring sales expert Jill Konrath, author of More Sales, Less Time, who shares the secret of how sales pros can save 1 to 2 hours per day while selling more in less time.

If, however, you enjoy spending much of your time on administrative tasks, or playing phone and email tag with prospects, then just keep doing what you’re doing. And good luck.

Kevin is director of content marketing for TimeTrade. He develops and curates the company’s public-facing information to enable customers and prospects to see the unique value TimeTrade solutions deliver to their businesses and teams. He also leads the company’s public relations program. In a high-technology career spanning three decades, Kevin has brought his communications and marketing expertise to a number of leading brands, including Verizon, PictureTel, Yankee Group, 3Com and Carbon Black. Before launching his tech career, Kevin honed his communications skills during 5 years as a radio news anchor and reporter. He earned a degree in English literature, but he credits his obsession with grammar, spelling and punctuation perfection to 12 years of daily drilling in parochial school.